Still under the weather. Not dramatically, not interestingly — just the grey, low-level kind of unwell that asks nothing of you except stillness and patience, two things that don't always come naturally.

The rain has been falling gently for the second day running, and I find it does something to my mood that I can't entirely account for. Making things feel slightly softer, slightly sadder. Though I'll admit it's possible I'm simply feeling a little sorry for myself, and the rain is just convenient company.

I had plans for the weekend. After finishing the 108 on Friday — completing the full form, which felt like a genuine milestone — I'd intended to practice both days, to stay close to what had just been achieved. But best laid plans, as they say, have their own ideas. The body asked for something different, and the body, on this occasion, won.

Man flu arrived today with the confidence of something that believes it deserves a full day of your attention.

It got one. The entire day, horizontal, without negotiation.

Hopefully tomorrow remembers to be different.

The days are long and hot now, summer arriving with the kind of certainty that makes winter feel like something you imagined. I will choose this over the cold without hesitation — but by the time the sun finally sets, I am ready for rest in the deep, uncomplicated way that only heat and effort together can produce.

The 108 is coming along. It should be finished early next week, which feels like a genuine achievement when I consider its length — not just the physical length, but the depth of it. The further I travel into this form, the more it seems to reveal. About Tai Chi. About Kung Fu. About life, if I'm willing to admit that without it sounding too grand. It has a way of gently demanding your full attention, not through difficulty exactly, but through something closer to concentration — the quiet requirement to be entirely present inside what you are doing, without drifting into the stories the mind finds so compelling when given half a chance.

I still drift. The mind still wanders. But I'm learning to notice the wandering sooner, and return without making too much of it.

Today felt lonely.

Today feels solemn.

I'm not sure whether it's the rain, or a mind that won't settle, or simply a heart that's quieter than usual — but something today feels muted. Like a slightly desaturated copy of yesterday, the colours still there but turned down, the edges softer than they should be.

These days arrive once in a while. They always have. And they still manage to make me stop and wonder about everything at once — which is not always the most productive use of a rainy afternoon, but it seems to be what today requires.

Everything comes to an end. Or does it?

Perhaps what we call endings are simply concepts — tools the human mind constructs to place full stops after major changes in the journey. Punctuation, not conclusion. A way of making sense of transition rather than naming something real.

I find myself returning to this thought occasionally, though never too deeply. Some questions feel more alive unanswered, more honest in their openness, and this is one of them. I'd rather carry it than solve it.

At the moment I'm studying the longest Tai Chi form the school offers — the 108. Its name made me curious in the way names sometimes do, and I found myself wondering whether it was called 108 simply because it contains 108 movements, or whether I was missing something larger.

Monday arrived with fire — sudden, unannounced, the temperature climbing from nowhere until the world felt altered. It's a dry heat here, the kind that burns clean, the kind that doesn't apologise. The kind that feels, strangely, like being alive.

A friend is leaving soon. So I made some barely convincing excuses to be near today, and I don't regret a single one of them.

I don't fully understand why certain people leave an impression so deep, so fast — arriving like something you weren't prepared for and settling in places you didn't know were empty. At first they feel almost like wounds. That deep, that close. But over time they soften, and in the softening they reveal something — a value, a meaning, that only distance and time can fully name.

I often wonder what life would look like without risk. Stripped of it entirely. And every time I follow that thought to its end, the answer feels the same — smaller. Quieter in the wrong way.

Everything worth having seems to require it. Not the kind of risk that leaves permanent damage, but the kind that leaves scars — on the heart, on the soul, in the places that don't show. And when I weigh the cost against what's waiting on the other side, it has always, without exception, felt worth it.

I'm not sure I have ever had a truly rewarding human experience that didn't ask something of me first. That didn't carry some possibility of loss. It seems inseparable from the thing itself — risk and meaning wound together, each one making the other possible.

So this week I begin again. I will not die wondering. I will follow my heart and give everything I have, because everything I have is everything I deserve to offer.

Yesterday was a very strange day.

Saturday had been unfolding with the quiet predictability of a metronome — four friends, a local café, coffee and easy conversation — until grief arrived without warning, the way it always does.

A phone call. A few seconds. And then a strong man's world shattered in front of us.

His sister was gone. The raw pain was instant and uncontrollable — something animal, something that couldn't be reasoned with or held back, surviving now on nothing but the thin thread of hope that the news might somehow mean something different than it did. It didn't. It never does.

"I don't see me in your eyes. Only her."

What a strange day it has been.

Practice was practice — and good practice at that. After yesterday's difficulty, something simply clicked today, the way things occasionally do without warning or explanation. The new form settled into place with a naturalness that felt almost unreasonable given how distant it had seemed just twenty-four hours before.

The difference was as stark as night and day, and the only thing that had actually changed was that my head felt like it was back on my shoulders. There was a calmness in the motion. What had felt unreachable yesterday now felt familiar, almost obvious — as though it had been waiting patiently for me to stop getting in the way.

To call today just a little uncomfortable would be the understatement of the year.

Nothing landed. Learning Tai Chi — which I normally find genuinely enjoyable — felt like trying to work without my memory switched on, which is not an ideal approach to a form as intricate as the 108. The body was present. Everything else had apparently decided not to show up.

Lunchtime couldn't come fast enough, until I remembered it meant another visit to the TCM doctor — and more needles in the bum than I care to count or dwell upon.

I tried to reset during a short rest. Tried to let the morning go, close the door on it, begin again. But by the time I returned to the courtyard for the afternoon session, nothing had changed. Brain still absent. Arms and feet still refusing to communicate with each other or with me.

Wednesday arrived with a dull ache in the lower back and a sharp complaint from the left hip — the body presenting its invoice, as it occasionally does, without much ceremony.

A lunchtime visit to the TCM doctor. Ten needles in the lower spine, four in the bum, two in the calf, and then the electrodes added, presumably because the needles alone felt insufficiently eventful. Just another Wednesday. Apparently this is simply the reality of being a long-term student at a Kung Fu school in China.

With the body under negotiation, training was kept to what I would generously call light duties. Tai Chi was the order of the day — practising, learning new movements, and then practising again. The new form is coming together in that quiet, incremental way that's easy to miss if you're looking for the wrong kind of progress. My coach noted that things looked tight, and he wasn't wrong. But I enjoyed every step regardless — every stance, every position, even the uncomfortable ones. Perhaps especially those.

For the first time in weeks, I closed my eyes and sleep found me without a fight. I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with beginning Tai Chi 108.

After more than a year of practicing TaiChi 28 and the 13, this new form arrives feeling strangely familiar — and yet, as always, completely different. Many of the movements are ones I know. But as today made clear, many others will take time. Real time. The unhurried, unglamorous kind.

Traffic pours through the school doors like a tide hitting the shoreline — relentless, unstoppable, and for me, mostly indifferent. So many people. So many stories. All unique, yet all somehow similar.

The truth is, you stop noticing after a while. Stop really listening. And then, quietly, you stop caring in the way you once did. A silent rhythm maintains the status quo — the planet spins, the clock ticks, and very little seems to change. Until someone walks through the door and something in you recognises them instantly. Not their face necessarily, but something older than that — the feeling of shared time, shared experience, shared life.

I have only felt this a handful of times. But rare as these moments are, they linger in the heart like unfinished songs — music still searching for its lyrics, the quiet promise of something that never quite found the light.

The hellos are easy. They cost almost nothing. It's the goodbyes that take their toll, leaving marks that will never be shown to anyone.

Sundays have slowly become the day I love the most. The only day with nowhere to be and nothing to do — a rare gift in a world that rarely stops asking.

I moved slowly beneath the warmth of a winter sun that seemed to revitalise my quieter self, step by step, as time passed unhurried and undemanding. There was something in that unhurriedness that felt almost medicinal.

By evening, I was genuinely relaxed — the deep kind, not the kind you have to convince yourself into. A friend and I walked through the park until a beautiful old tree stopped us both without either of us suggesting it. It swayed gently in the warm breeze, indifferent and patient, and we sat beneath it and talked in the way that sometimes happens between people who haven't known each other long but have, for whatever reason, decided to be honest. Subjects surfaced that don't usually find their way into new friendships. Something about the afternoon made it feel safe enough to let what was being felt simply be expressed.

Some days are just fun, and I'm not entirely sure what to do with that when it happens.

No deep reason for it. Nothing shifted in the practice; no breakthrough arrived. I was simply alive and doing what I wanted to be doing, and somewhere in the doing of it, the day became easy in a way I hadn't planned for and probably couldn't have arranged if I'd tried.

Training was good from the start. Not extraordinary — just good. Enjoyable in that quiet, almost unremarkable way where you finish and realise you've been smiling without noticing. The energy in the school felt lighter somehow, more open. Conversations landed easily. When someone smiled, you found yourself smiling back without any particular reason to. The whole day just flowed, from the first session through to the evening, without the usual friction.

It seems to come down to the smallest things. The longer I am here, the more I feel that, and the harder it is to explain.

The detail that shifts something you thought you knew. A touch that makes you feel warm without being asked to. The silence between two people that carries more than anything either of them could have said. These moments have always existed, but they're more visible to me now in a way I can't entirely account for — as though something in the practice has made me more permeable to them.

I'm genuinely not sure whether this is a stimulant the soul reaches for, something that reminds you you're alive on every level — or whether it's something simpler than that, just a thread of attention that keeps you curious enough to show up for another day. The longer I sit with the question, the less confident I am that I have the right answer, which I've started to find more amusing than troubling.

The week starts on the floor, before the sun has crested the horizon.

It's become a ritual of sorts — the yoga mat, the quiet of the morning before anything else has claimed it, the body finding its range through slow and deliberate stretching. I look forward to it now in a way I wouldn't have predicted when I started, which I take as a sign that something has genuinely shifted rather than just been forced into habit.

Flexibility has never come easily to me, and I want to be honest about that rather than present some version where the practice has been smooth and progressive. It's work that has to be done every day, unglamorous and sometimes uncomfortable, and for a long time, it produced results so gradual they were hard to see. Over the last two months, something has changed enough that I can feel it clearly. The body is looser. More than that, there is less pain. When discomfort arises during practice, it tends to fade with the breath now rather than requiring me to push through it or work around it. That's new. That matters.

The Sunday I needed arrived today, which I hadn't fully realised I was waiting for until it was here.

Everything slowed in a way that felt welcomed rather than imposed — my mind, my movements, the pace at which one thing followed another. I became, by any reasonable measure, a world champion nap-taking machine, which surprised me a little because I don't think of myself as particularly good at stillness. My actions today would suggest otherwise.

End of the week and the tiredness is in the bones in the way that's always welcome — the deep kind, without pain, the kind that tells you something real was done. It arrives like an old friend you're always glad to see.

The morning was desk work, catching up on things that had slipped while the practice demanded priority. Then the pull toward the tree — the old one in the spot I've made a habit of, where the leaves let the light through in a way you couldn't plan for if you tried. I lay on the grass and let my mind drift lightly over the past two weeks, not examining anything too hard, just letting the recent past settle.

A few days have gone by without anything particular catching my attention, or perhaps more accurately, without me catching theirs. Time is moving the way it does when the weather turns warmer and the season changes gear — almost invisibly, the days drifting past on a warm current.

The Kung Fu Fan form is approaching completion, which I understand by now means it is about to truly begin. That's not a paradox I find frustrating anymore.